VR and sense of speed?

Five.Stars · 7 Mar 2016 at 17:16

Hi, my Rift is pre purchased, but as someone who hasn't yet had the experience of any sort of VR, how does VR represent a sense of speed? That is one of my major gripes with playing racers, or even flight sims is that you never get a realistic representation that you are travelling sometimes at +200mph. Obviously without depth cues etc, that is understandable. Does VR solve this and give you a genuine sense that you are travelling at a substantial speed?

Flashheart · 8 Mar 2016 at 23:16

ci_newman · 9 Mar 2016 at 09:01

Especially if you use it with a force feedback steering wheel

olivier renault · 14 Mar 2016 at 08:51

Speed isn't the issue, and in fact, it's really good at giving a sense of speed and danger. Long draw distances are a problem, at least at the moment. Even then, I'm curious to see how the first-gen consumer VR will work out for racing. Would need 4K per eye to be sharp enough. So really, we're a looooong way away from having viable 'retina' levels of resolution.

Remember, it's all about FOV. Pixel density per degree. So a screen is about 25-30 degree FOV (do the maths!). A VR headset, ideally 100 degrees and above. So you need 4x the resolution per eye for comparison. Or the other way round, you can do the maths to get a feeling of how pixelated it's gonna (in my case, very pixelated with a DK1, which is only viable for corridor games and Minecraft).

andybird123 · 14 Mar 2016 at 09:01

My screen is much more than 30 degrees as I have a sim rig with it mounted as close as possible

But yes, headsets need to be an order of magnitude better to approach "clear"

The improvements I've seen from DK1 to DK2 to GearVR have me hopeful that the CV1 will be useful.

Zogger · 15 Mar 2016 at 12:31

IMO, sense of speed yes,
sense of acceleration and G-Force - no, of course. It will never compare to the actual feeling of driving when taking a turn at speed, or the feeling of a drop or compression when flying. That is what I really miss in driving and flight sims. I'm sure a motion simulator would get you some way there but that's never going to happen in my house

Merlin5 · 16 Mar 2016 at 03:25

I've been playing this game all night called Smash Hit.

It's really addictive, smashing glass and trying not to run out of balls. Nice music with it too :cool:

It's great fun and very immersive. Some levels are slow and relaxing, and others accelerate quite fast testing your reflexes, even rotating and changing from forward motion to vertical climb. I do get a decent sense of speed.